PRESSING ALLIES, PRESIDENT WARNS OF AFGHAN BATTLE

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: February 16, 2007

CORRECTION APPENDED

President Bush warned on Thursday that he expected ''fierce fighting'' to flare in Afghanistan this spring, and he pressed NATO allies to provide a bigger and more aggressive force to guard against a resurgence by the Taliban and Al Qaeda that could threaten the fragile Afghan state.

With American and NATO commanders pressing for more troops and experts predicting that further gains by the Taliban could put the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai in danger, Mr. Bush used his presidential platform to lay out what he said was substantial progress in Afghanistan since 2001, but also a continuing threat.

The remarks, to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization here, amounted to an unusually high-profile acknowledgment from Mr. Bush of the precarious state of the effort to stabilize Afghanistan, a country the administration long held up as a foreign policy success story.

The speech renewed criticism from Democrats that had the United States not been tied down in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan would not have turned dire. At the same time, some Republican lawmakers said Mr. Bush's new strategy would not do enough to tamp down the Afghan drug trade. Outside experts criticized the president for painting too rosy a picture.

The speech was also a striking effort by the White House to focus attention back on Afghanistan at a time when Congress is debating resolutions criticizing Mr. Bush's strategy in Iraq and the administration is making a case that Iranian forces are supplying Shiite militants in Iraq with roadside bombs.

''Across Afghanistan last year, the number of roadside bomb attacks almost doubled, direct fire attacks on international forces almost tripled, and suicide bombings grew nearly fivefold,'' Mr. Bush said. ''These escalating attacks were part of a Taliban offensive that made 2006 the most violent year in Afghanistan since the liberation of the country.''

Mr. Bush said the question now was whether to ''just kind of let this young democracy wither and fade away'' or to step up the fight.

''The snow is going to melt in the Hindu Kush mountains, and when it does we can expect fierce fighting to continue,'' Mr. Bush said. ''The Taliban and Al Qaeda are preparing to launch new attacks. Our strategy is not to be on the defense, but to go on the offense.''

Mr. Bush noted that he has already extended the tour of a 3,200-soldier American brigade and called on Congress to provide $11.8 billion more to pay for operations in Afghanistan over the next two years.

The president said his administration had completed a review of its Afghan strategy, and would work to increase the size of the Afghan army from 32,000 troops to 70,000 by the end of next year, and to bring in additional allied troops to support the fledgling army.

''When there is a need, when the commanders on the ground say to our respective countries, 'We need additional help,' our NATO countries must provide it in order to be successful in the mission,'' Mr. Bush said.

He promised to build new roads that would help spur economic development, to battle an increase in the opium trade and to try to forge better ties between Afghanistan and its neighbor, Pakistan.

At the same time, Mr. Bush pledged to work with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan to root out Taliban and Qaeda fighters who hide in that country's remote mountainous regions -- a situation he described as ''wilder than the Wild West.'' And, echoing his lament that 2006 was a difficult and disappointing year for Iraq, the president said the same had been true in Afghanistan.

Some critics of the administration's handling of Afghanistan said Mr. Bush was still understating the difficulties there.

''We underfinanced, undermanned and under-resourced the war in Afghanistan for the last four years, and now we face a serious threat that the Taliban will succeed in destabilizing the country enough in 2007 to make the Karzai government collapse at some point,'' said Bruce Riedel, a scholar at the Saban Center for Middle East Studies at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning research organization in Washington. He called the speech ''a long overdue recognition that we need to do a lot more.''

Both Mr. Riedel and Rick Barton, an expert in Afghanistan reconstruction at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Mr. Bush's new strategy did not do enough to promote security and economic development. Mr. Barton, who published a report in 2005 measuring progress in Afghanistan in that year, is about to publish another, and said the situation has turned measurably worse since his first study.

''We've gotten into a situation where things have really turned negative and the average Afghan has lost confidence in both the safety of his country and the ability of the leadership to turn things around,'' Mr. Barton said. He said the president ''is definitely acknowledging that, but his reality therapy is not as thorough or as complete as I think it needs to be.''

On Capitol Hill, the senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, released a statement criticizing the speech. Ms. Ros-Lehtinen and several other Republicans have been pressing the Bush administration to do more to crack down on Afghanistan's opium trade; she said the new strategy lacked ''practical initiatives to target major drug kingpins and warlords whose trade in opium finances the Taliban's campaign.''

As Iraq has dominated the American psyche, some lawmakers, most recently the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, have called Afghanistan ''the forgotten war.'' The Democratic National Committee, responding to Mr. Bush's speech on Thursday, issued a statement saying, ''The Bush administration took its eye off the ball in Afghanistan.''

But Mr. Bush pointed to what he called ''remarkable progress'' since the American invasion in 2001: A democratically elected government with a parliament that includes 91 women; more than five million children in school as opposed to 900,000 under the Taliban; and the return of more than 4.6 million refugees.

The president's speech came after his new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, attended his first conference of NATO defense ministers last week in Seville, Spain. At the meeting, Mr. Gates pressed his allied counterparts to fulfill their commitments of troops in time for a spring offensive against the Taliban.

Currently, NATO has about 35,000 troops in Afghanistan, about 13,000 of them American. The United States has 9,000 more troops in Afghanistan operating outside the NATO mission, handling tasks like specialized counterterrorism work and helping to train Afghan forces. Gen. David J. Richards of Britain, the outgoing NATO commander in Afghanistan, said last month that NATO was 4,000 to 5,000 troops short.

But NATO commanders have been constrained by so-called caveats -- restrictions imposed by member nations on how their troops may be used and where they may be sent. The Bush administration has been pressing the allies to lift those restrictions, and the president renewed that call on Thursday, saying NATO commanders ''must have the flexibility they need to defeat the enemy wherever the enemy may make a stand.''

Photo: President Bush discussed the situation in Afghanistan yesterday at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. (Photo by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)(pg. A8)

Correction: February 17, 2007, Saturday
A picture with an article yesterday about comments by President Bush on the fighting in Afghanistan carried an erroneous credit. It was by Doug Mills of The New York Times, not Stephen Crowley of The Times.